Doctor Zhivago

by Boris Pasternak

  The doctor almost waved away this tangible beauty of the hour, like a crowd of importunate commiserators; he was almost ready to whisper to the sunset’s rays reaching out to him: “Thanks. Don’t bother.”

  He went on standing on the porch, his face to the closed door, turning away from the world. “My bright sun has set,” something within him repeated and re-echoed. He had no strength to utter this sequence of words aloud without convulsive spasms in the throat interrupting them.

  He went into the house. A double monologue, two sorts of monologue, started and played out in him: a dry, seemingly businesslike one with respect to himself, and an expansive, boundless one addressed to Lara. This is how his thoughts went: “Now I’ll go to Moscow. The first thing is to survive. Not to surrender to insomnia. Not to fall asleep. To work at night to the point of stupefaction, until I drop from fatigue. And another thing. To heat the bedroom at once, so as not to be needlessly cold at night.”

  But he also talked to himself like this: “My unforgettable delight! As long as the crooks of my arms remember you, as long as you’re still on my hands and lips, I’ll be with you. I’ll shed tears about you in something worthy, abiding. I’ll write down my memory of you in a tender, tender, achingly sorrowful portrayal. I’ll stay here until I’ve done it. And then I’ll leave myself. This is how I’ll portray you. I’ll set your features on paper, as, after a terrible storm that churns the sea to its bottom, the traces of the strongest, farthest-reaching wave lie on the sand. In a broken, meandering line the sea heaps up pumice stones, bits of cork, shells, seaweed, the lightest, most weightless things it could lift from the bottom. This is the line of the highest tide stretching endlessly along the shore. So the storm of life cast you up to me, my pride. And so I will portray you.”

  He went into the house, locked the door, took off his coat. When he went into the room that Lara had tidied up so well and with such care in the morning, and in which everything had now been turned upside down again by her hasty departure, when he saw the rumpled, unmade bed and things lying about in disorder, thrown on the floor and chairs, he sank to his knees before the bed like a little boy, leaned his whole breast against its hard edge, and, burying his face in the hanging end of the coverlet, wept with a childish ease and bitterness. This did not go on for long. Yuri Andreevich stood up, quickly wiped his tears, looked around with a distractedly astonished and wearily absent gaze, took out the bottle Komarovsky had left, uncorked it, poured half a glass, added water, mixed in some snow, and with a pleasure almost equal to his just-shed, inconsolable tears, began drinking this mixture in slow, greedy gulps.

  14

  Something incongruous was taking place in Yuri Andreevich. He was slowly losing his mind. He had never yet led such a strange existence. He neglected the house, stopped looking after himself, turned nights into days, and lost count of the time that had passed since Lara’s departure.

  He drank and wrote things devoted to her, but the Lara of his verses and notes, as he struck out and replaced one word with another, kept moving further away from her true prototype, Katenka’s living mother, who was now traveling with Katya.

  Yuri Andreevich did this crossing out from considerations of precision and power of expression, but it also answered to the promptings of inner restraint, which did not allow him to reveal personal experiences and unfictitious happenings too openly, so as not to wound or offend the direct participants in what had been written and lived through. Thus what was visceral, still pulsing and warm, was forced out of the poems, and instead of the bleeding and noxious, a serene breadth appeared in them, raising the particular case to a generality familiar to all. He did not strive for this goal, but this breadth came of itself like a comfort sent to him personally by the traveler, like a distant greeting from her, like her appearance in a dream, or like the touch of her hand on his brow. And he loved this ennobling stamp on his verses.

  With this lament for Lara, he also finished scribbling down his stuff from various periods about all sorts of things, about nature, about everyday life. As had always happened to him before as well, a multitude of thoughts about personal life and the life of society descended upon him while he worked, simultaneously and in passing.

  He again thought that his notion of history, of what is known as the course of history, was not at all the same as the accepted one, and that he pictured it as similar to the life of the vegetable kingdom. In winter, under snow, the bare branches of a deciduous forest are as scraggly and pathetic as the hairs on an old man’s wart. In spring the forest is transformed in a few days, rises to the clouds; one can lose oneself, hide oneself in its leafy maze. This transformation is achieved by a movement that surpasses in speed the movements of animals, since animals do not grow as quickly as plants, and that can never be observed. A forest does not move; we cannot catch it, cannot surprise it changing place. We always find it immobile. And it is in the same immobility that we find the eternally growing, eternally changing life of society, history, in its unobservable transformations.

  Tolstoy did not carry his thought through to the end when he denied the role of initiators to Napoleon, to rulers, to generals.3 He thought precisely the same, but he did not voice it with full clarity. No one makes history, it is not visible, just as it is impossible to see grass grow. Wars, revolutions, tsars, Robespierres—these are its organic stimulants, its fermenting yeast. Revolutions are produced by men of action, one-sided fanatics, geniuses of self-limitation. In a few hours or days they overturn the old order. The upheavals last for weeks, for years at the most, and then for decades, for centuries, people bow down to the spirit of limitation that led to the upheavals as to something sacred.

  With his lament for Lara, he also lamented that far-off summer in Meliuzeevo, when the revolution was a god come down from heaven to earth, the god of that time, that summer, and each one went mad in his own way, and the life of each existed by itself and not as an explanatory illustration confirming the rightness of superior politics.

  With this sketching out of various odds and ends, he again verified and noted down that art always serves beauty, and beauty is the happiness of having form, while form is the organic key to existence, for every living thing must have form in order to exist, and thus art, including tragic art, is an account of the happiness of existing. These reflections and notes also brought him happiness, so tragic and filled with tears that his head grew weary and ached from it.

  Anfim Efimovich came to call on him. He also brought vodka and told him about the departure of Antipova with her daughter and Komarovsky. Anfim Efimovich came by rail on a handcar. He scolded the doctor for not taking proper care of the horse and took her back, despite Yuri Andreevich’s request to bear with him for three or four more days. Instead he promised to come in person and fetch the doctor after that time and remove him from Varykino for good.

  Sometimes, writing away, working away, Yuri Andreevich suddenly remembered the departed woman in all distinctness and lost his head from tenderness and the keenness of deprivation. As once in childhood, amidst the splendor of summer nature, he had fancied that he heard the voice of his dead mother in the trilling of the birds, so his hearing, accustomed to Lara, grown used to her voice, now sometimes deceived him. “Yurochka,” he sometimes heard in an auditory hallucination from the next room.

  Other sensory deceptions also befell him during that week. At the end of it, in the night, he suddenly woke up after an oppressive, absurd dream about a dragon’s lair under the house. He opened his eyes. Suddenly the bottom of the ravine was lit up with fire and resounded with the crack and boom of someone firing a gun. Surprisingly, a moment after this extraordinary occurrence, the doctor fell back to sleep, and in the morning he decided that he had dreamed it all.

  15

  Here is what happened a little later during one of those days. The doctor finally heeded the voice of reason. He said to himself that if one has set oneself the goal of doing oneself in at all costs, one could find a more effective a
nd less tormenting way. He promised himself that as soon as Anfim Efimovich came for him, he would immediately leave the place.

  Before evening, while it was still light, he heard the loud crunch of someone’s footsteps on the snow. Someone was calmly walking towards the house with brisk, resolute strides.

  Strange. Who could it be? Anfim Efimovich would have come with a horse. There were no passersby in deserted Varykino. “It’s for me,” Yuri Andreevich decided. “A summons or a request to come to town. Or to arrest me. But how will they take me? And then there should be two of them. It’s Mikulitsyn, Averky Stepanovich,” he surmised, rejoicing, recognizing his guest, as he thought, by his gait. The man, who was still a riddle, paused for a moment at the door with the broken-off bar, not finding the expected padlock on it, and then moved on with assured steps and knowing movements, opening the doors before him and closing them carefully, in a proprietary way.

  These strangenesses found Yuri Andreevich at his desk, where he sat with his back to the entrance. While he was getting up from his chair and turning his face to the door so as to receive the visitor, the man was already standing on the threshold, stopped as if rooted to the spot.

  “Whom do you want?” escaped from the doctor with an unconsciousness that did not oblige him to anything, and when no answer followed, Yuri Andreevich was not surprised.

  The man who had come in was strong and well-built, with a handsome face. He was wearing a short fur jacket, fur-lined trousers, and warm goatskin boots, and had a rifle slung over his shoulder on a leather strap.

  Only the moment of the stranger’s appearance was unexpected for the doctor, not his coming. His findings in the house and other tokens had prepared Yuri Andreevich for this meeting. The man who had come in was obviously the one to whom the supplies in the house belonged. In appearance he seemed to be someone the doctor had already seen and knew. The visitor had probably also been forewarned that the house was not empty. He was not surprised enough to find it inhabited. Maybe he had been told whom he would meet inside. Maybe he himself knew the doctor.

  “Who is he? Who is he?” The doctor painfully searched his memory. “Lord help me, where have I seen him before? Can it be? A hot May morning in some immemorial year. The railway junction in Razvilye. The ill-omened carriage of the commissar. Clarity of notions, straightforwardness, strictness of principles, rightness, rightness, rightness. Strelnikov!”

  16

  They had been talking for a long time already, several hours straight, as only Russians in Russia talk, in particular those who are frightened and anguished, and those who are distraught and frenzied, as all people were then. Evening was coming. It was getting dark.

  Besides the uneasy talkativeness that Strelnikov shared with everybody, he also talked incessantly for some other reason of his own.

  He could not have enough of talking and clung with all his might to the conversation with the doctor, so as to avoid solitude. Did he fear pangs of conscience or sad memories that pursued him, or was he tormented by dissatisfaction with himself, which makes a man unbearable and hateful to himself and ready to die of shame? Or had he taken some dreadful, irrevocable decision, with which he did not want to be left alone, and the fulfillment of which he kept postponing as long as possible by chatting with the doctor and being in his company?

  However it was, Strelnikov was hiding some important secret that weighed on him, while giving himself in all the rest to the most lavish outpourings of the heart.

  This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver. On the slightest pretext, a rage of self-castigating imagination would play itself out to the uttermost limits. People fantasized, denounced themselves, not only under the effect of fear, but also drawn on by a destructively morbid inclination, of their own free will, in a state of metaphysical trance and passion for self-condemnation that, once set loose, could not be stopped.

  How much of this evidence, written and oral, given on the point of death, had been read and heard in his time by the prominent military, and sometimes also court-martial, figure Strelnikov. Now he himself was possessed by a similar fit of self-exposure, re-evaluated himself entirely, put a bottom line to everything, saw everything in a feverish, distorted, delirious misinterpretation.

  Strelnikov was telling it all without order, jumping from confession to confession.

  “It was near Chitá. Were you struck by the curiosities I stuffed the cupboards and drawers in this house with? It’s all from war requisitions, which we carried out when the Red Army occupied eastern Siberia. Naturally, I didn’t drag it on my back myself. Life always pampered me with loyal, devoted people. These candles, matches, coffee, tea, writing materials, and all the rest are partly from Czech military property, partly Japanese and English. Wonders of the world, right? ‘Right?’ was my wife’s favorite expression, as you’ve probably noticed. I didn’t know whether to tell you this at once, but now I’ll confess. I came to see her and our daughter. I wasn’t told in time that they were here. And now I’m too late. When I learned about your intimacy with her from gossip and reports, and the name Doctor Zhivago was first uttered, I remembered in some inconceivable way, out of the thousands of faces that have flashed past me in these years, a doctor of that name who was once brought to me for interrogation.”

  “And you were sorry you didn’t have him shot?”

  Strelnikov let this remark go unnoticed. Perhaps he did not even hear his interlocutor interrupt his monologue with his own insertion. He went on distractedly and pensively.

  “Of course, I was jealous of you, and I’m jealous now. How could it be otherwise? I’ve been hiding in these parts only in recent months, after my other covers failed far to the east. I was supposed to be court-martialed on a false accusation. The outcome was easy to predict. I didn’t know myself to be guilty of anything. There was a hope that I might vindicate myself and defend my good name in the future under better circumstances. I decided to quit the field in good time, before I was arrested, and meanwhile to hide, wander about, live like a hermit. Maybe I would have saved myself in the end. A young rascal who wormed his way into my confidence did me a bad turn.

  “I was going west through Siberia on foot, in winter, hiding, starving. I buried myself in the snow, spent nights in snow-covered trains, of which there were endless chains standing under the snow then along the Siberian main line.

  “In my wanderings, I ran into a vagabond boy who supposedly had survived after being shot by the partisans in a line of other men executed at the same time. He supposedly crawled from under the pile of corpses, caught his breath, recovered, and then began moving about from one lair to another, like myself. At least that’s what he told me. A scoundrelly adolescent, full of vices, backward, one of those dunces who get thrown out of school for inability.”

  The more details Strelnikov gave, the better the doctor recognized the boy.

  “First name Terenty, last name Galuzin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then all that about the partisans and the execution is true. He didn’t invent any of it.”

  “The only good feature the boy had was that he madly adored his mother. His father had perished as a hostage. He learned that his mother was in prison and would share the father’s lot, and decided to do anything to free her. In the provincial Cheka, where he came pleading guilty and offering his services, they agreed to forgive him everything for the price of some important information. He pointed out the place where I was hiding. I managed to forestall his betrayal and disappear in time.

  “With fantastic efforts, with thousands of adventures, I crossed Siberia and came here, to places where I’m known to everybody and am least of all expected to appear, such boldness not being presumed on my part. And indeed they spent a long time searching for me around Chitá, while I was hiding in this h
ouse or some other refuge in the area. But now it’s the end. They’ve tracked me down here, too. Listen. It’s getting dark. I don’t like the time that’s coming, because I lost my sleep long ago. You know what a torment that is. If you haven’t burned up all my candles—excellent stearine candles, right?—let’s talk a bit longer. Let’s talk as long as you can, with every luxury, all night long, with candles burning.”

  “There are candles. Only one pack has been opened. I burned the kerosene I found here.”

  “Do you have any bread?”

  “No.”

  “What did you live on? However, I’m asking a stupid question. On potatoes. I know.”

  “Yes. There’s all you could want here. The owners of the place were experienced and provident. They knew how to store them. They’re all safe in the cellar. Didn’t rot or freeze.”

  Suddenly Strelnikov began talking about the revolution.

  17

  “All this is not for you. You won’t understand it. You grew up differently. There was the world of the city’s outskirts, a world of railroad tracks and workmen’s barracks. Filth, overcrowding, destitution, the degradation of man in the laborer, the degradation of women. There was the gleeful, unpunished impudence of depravity, of mama’s boys, well-heeled students, and little merchants. The tears and complaints of the robbed, the injured, the seduced were dismissed with a joke or an outburst of scornful vexation. This was the olympianism of parasites, remarkable only in that they did not trouble themselves about anything, never sought anything, neither gave nor left the world anything!

  “But we took up life like a military campaign, we moved mountains for the sake of those we loved. And though we brought them nothing but grief, we did not offend them in the least, because we turned out to be even greater martyrs than they were.